New Study Proves That This Generation of Teenagers Is the GOAT

At least in terms of sex, drugs, and alcohol.

Today’s teens just got an A+ on the U.S. government’s biannual report card on risky teen behaviors. Every two years, more than 10,000 high school students fill out the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, and the results are in: teens today are way better behaved than teens 20 years ago.

According to the CDC, “From 1991 through 2013, the YRBSS has collected data from more than 2.6 million high school students in more than 1,100 separate surveys.” The results show that a lot has changed for the better since the 1990s. Kids today smoke less, drink less, and have less sex than their parents did — meaning the self-indulgent Clueless culture is officially uncool.

While teens today eat worse and have higher rates of obesity than kids in the nineties, most say no to substance abuse, which is an important step forward. Nowadays, only 15.7% of teens smoke, compared to 30.5% of high school students 20 years ago. “Since 1996 and 1997, we’ve gotten 75 to 85% reductions in smoking, especially among 12th grade students,” Lloyd Johnston, a University of Michigan researcher who studies adolescent behavior, told Vox. There’s been a steady decline in smoking since the 1960s, when the Surgeon General alerted the public that smoking could cause cancer and emphysema, but it’s not clear why there’s also been a steady decline in alcohol consumption. In the '90s, over 80% of kids said they tried alcohol, but that number has dropped to just over 65% today. Binge drinking rates have also dropped by 30% since 1990, which means that fewer kids are at risk for alcohol poisoning.

Teen pregnancies too have decreased dramatically over the last two decades. In 1995, 5.6% of teen girls had babies, in 2014 that figure dropped to 2.4%. The reason for this isn't entirely clear, but as mentioned above, the most overwhelming cause is that teens have less sex today than 20 years ago. In 1991, 54.1% of teens said they had had sex at least once, but in 2013 only 46.8% of teens answered that they were sexually active to the same question. And of course, teens are also more educated about using contraceptives and condoms.

"It's exciting and really unprecedented to see these types of declines on a health issue," Ginny Ehrlich, the chief executive of the Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told Vox.

Even seatbelt use was up — 92.4% of teens today, versus 80.9% of teens 20 years ago. In other words, teens are smarter, safer, and more cautious when it comes to most health issues than their parents and previous generations by pretty large margins. Best generation yet? Perhaps.